The laws that govern our digital age

As every morning when you wake up and put your feets on the ground you can feel the imperceptible law of gravity, the technology changes are reshaping your environment in an invisibly way directly related to each individual, organization or company.

New laws are fueling technology development, which is growing exponentially, driving our growth in a virtuous cycle. But there’s a serious disconnection, consciously or unconsciously, that´s the main problem that we have to think about it.

What are these exploitative business models behind the scene of disruption? We’ve entered the world of Madoff’s law: “Anywhere profit can be made, it will be made.”

So what does that mean? It means that profit has driven business models to greater and greater effectiveness and efficiency, so much so that these businesses are now often evolved far beyond the average human’s ability to deal with it.

When you talk about growing on the exponential curve of technology development, the implications are very exciting. There’s Moore’s law, explains that the processing power of a microchip doubles every 24 months; corollary, computers become faster and the price of a given level of computing power halves every 24 months, towards to quantum computer.

But what about all the things that are not advancing exponentially, what about step functions, and so on? These include our basic instincts, our human biology. So, our basic instincts could be easily manipulated in light of the rapid change sweeping up on us.

Gilder’s law, proposed by George Gilder, prolific author and prophet of the new technology age establish that the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months. New developments seem to confirm that bandwidth availability will continue to expand at a rate that supports Gilder’s Law.

Metcalfe’s law, set that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes; so, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially, while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.

As more and more “nodes” become connected – products, equipment, people, organizations – Metcalfe’s Law comes into play. The effectiveness and value of the Internet continues to increase exponentially.

Reed’s law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

So that even if the utility of groups available to be joined is very small on a peer-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.

More recently, we’ve seen the rise of Zuckerberg’s law, which says that the amount of information shared between people doubles every 12 to 18 months, that´s the best exercise of collective intelligence connected ever known.

And finally we have Eric Pulier’s law, which says the time and cost to launch a venture that reaches 100 million people halves every 12 to 18 months.

From the thought to understand all the previous laws that are working with us constantly in every moment of our life, it comes the great question:

What happen with the Court´s laws that in a common sense have to drive and regulate all this technology changes?

Here we´re talking about a problem of speed difference, the rules that have to shape the tech advancement can´t achieve the balance, the eternal issue between the Coyote and the Roadrunner.

“Where the Coyote can never catch the Roadrunner who always runs more quickly”